Creating or editing a contact is how you add someone to CRM and keep their information up to date. Both actions use the same form-style page, and Rhythm cleans up, fills in, and checks details when you save.
When to Use This
Use this process to add a new person to CRM or update an existing contact’s name, contact information, addresses, and custom fields. If you only need to change a contact’s status, such as active, inactive, deceased, or duplicate, or delete a contact, see Change a Contact's Status or Delete a Contact instead. Those changes use a separate, smaller dialog. To move a contact between organizations or review their organization history, see Manage a Contact's Organization, Role, and History.
If you need to add many new contacts at once, go to System & Security › Custom Data Tasks, choose Import Records, target the Contacts & Organizations application and the Contacts service, and map your spreadsheet columns to the matching fields. After an import creates the records, you may still need a follow-up mass update for a field that did not map cleanly, such as a contact’s Type. Support does not import new contacts from a spreadsheet for you through the help channel, and this is not always a simple self-service task. Because imports require mapping decisions, many associations have Rhythm’s data-import service upload the file, or have a custom import built for a fee, instead of mapping and running it themselves.
If the people already exist as contacts and you only need to update them, you do not need an import. Build a query, select the results, and use Bulk Changes › Mass Update, or upload a roster file through System & Security › Mass Updates, to change many contacts at once. That same tool clears a field, such as a middle name, on every selected contact when you leave the value blank. See Update Records in Bulk.
Prerequisites
- Permission to create contacts, if you are adding a new contact, or permission to edit contacts, if you are changing an existing contact.
- Your Rhythm account must have a Console contact form configured for the action you are taking: one form for creating contacts and one for editing them. If the right form is not configured, the page cannot show any fields and tells you that no form is configured.
Create a New Contact
- Go to CRM › Contacts and select Create Contact.
- Fill in the fields on your organization’s form. Your administrator controls which fields appear, their order, and which fields are required, so create-contact pages can look very different between Rhythm accounts.
- Save the form.
Result
Rhythm creates the contact and takes you to the new contact’s record page with the message "Contact saved successfully."
Edit an Existing Contact
- Open the contact's record, then either select Edit this Contact in the page header, or open Contact Options and select Edit Contact Info.
- Change the fields you need to.
- Save the form.
Result
Rhythm saves your changes and returns you to the contact’s record page.
Tip
Members can also update some of their own contact information from the Portal using a similar form. The Portal form is controlled separately from the Console form, including which fields members can change and whether their name or organization can be locked.
What Rhythm Does Automatically
Rhythm makes several small cleanups and calculations every time you save a contact, whether you notice them or not:
- Contact numbers. Every new contact gets the next available number as its identifier, so you never choose one yourself.
- Courtesy titles. If you type a title like "Dr" into a salutation field, Rhythm moves it to the prefix field and standardizes the formatting.
- Phone number formatting. When a phone number looks like a United States number, Rhythm reformats it into a consistent style, no matter how you typed it.
- Repeated nicknames. If the nickname you enter matches the first name, Rhythm removes it instead of saving a duplicate value.
- Splitting a single name field. If your form has only one name field and you type a full name into it, Rhythm splits it into first name, last name, and other name parts. Rhythm only does this when neither a first name nor a last name was already provided. An ambiguous multi-word name may be split differently than you intended because Rhythm cannot always tell whether a word belongs to a multi-word last name or to a separate middle name. If a contact has a multi-part surname, check the individual name fields after saving, and correct them directly if needed. When the exact surname structure matters, edit the separate First Name, Middle Name, and Last Name fields directly instead of typing into a single combined name field.
- Display names. Rhythm recalculates the contact’s display and sort names from the individual name parts every time you save. If those name parts are already filled in, you generally cannot type over the display and sort names directly.
- Blank values are dropped. Rhythm does not save an empty email address field or an empty custom phone number entry as a blank value. It simply leaves the empty value out.
- Preferred address and phone. Rhythm uses the preferred kind you choose, such as home, work, or school, to calculate the contact’s specific preferred address and phone number. Rhythm recalculates that choice every time the contact is viewed, so a later address change can change the preferred address without you updating the preferred setting again.
- A photo you upload is saved on the contact after you upload it through the form’s own photo control. You cannot point the contact photo to a file staged somewhere else.
Custom fields your association has defined for contacts are saved the same way as the other fields on the form. They belong to the contact’s CRM record, so a custom field you fill in here is a CRM field, separate from details other applications may track about the same person. If you rename an option in a custom field, contacts that already had the old value keep it; they do not switch automatically. To bring them up to date, build a Contacts query for the old value, then use a mass update to move those records to the new one. For a larger or more varied set of records, export the query results, replace the old value with the new one in the file, and upload the edited file as the mass update’s source.
- Communication preferences. If your form includes the communication-preferences component, saving records each communication type’s opt-in or opt-out choice as shown on the form.
Warning
If the Edit Contact page shows every communication preference as selected when that is not right, do not save it that way. Saving while the page incorrectly shows everything selected enables every communication type for that contact, since Rhythm keeps only the current choices on the form. Double-check the choices shown before you save.
What Can Stop a Save
- Date of birth must be a real date. Rhythm refuses an invalid date. It does not check whether the date falls in a sensible range compared with today or with a stored date of death.
- A duplicate primary email, if your account prevents them. If your Rhythm account prevents two contacts from sharing a primary email address, Rhythm refuses a save when another contact already uses that email. This includes changing only the letter case of the current email because Rhythm still treats that as a change it needs to check. If that refusal gets in the way of a simple capitalization fix, save the email with an extra character added first, so it reads as a different address, then edit it again to remove that character and save the capitalization you want.
- A stale copy of the record. If someone else changed the contact after you opened it, Rhythm may refuse your save because your copy is out of date.
- A custom address type you just added or changed. Some accounts have seen a save fail after adding or editing a custom address type on the form, with an error naming the address as not allowed. If adding or changing a custom address triggers an error, try saving without that change and add the custom address separately afterward.
Warning
A contact form’s name field can look required and still let you save without a name in some cases. Do not rely on that as a way to skip entering one; treat the name field as required regardless of whether the save is refused.
When Rhythm refuses a save, you see a message explaining what went wrong. The form keeps what you typed so you can fix the issue and try again.
Leaving Without Saving
If you leave the create or edit page while you still have unsaved changes, Rhythm warns you that your changes will be lost. Rhythm does not show this warning if you close the browser tab or reload the page.
Related Reading
For help while you fill in the form, including suggested organizations, duplicate warnings, and pronoun suggestions, see Get Help Entering a Contact's Details. Custom fields on the contact form come from your account’s custom field setup, and the form itself is one of your account’s web forms.
If you need to know when a contact record was created, use the Sys Created At field in a Contacts query. A query's general Created Date field does not give you this for contacts.